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Using the Internet comes with a cost: Protecting your privacy

By Dave Burdick, The Denver Post

Posted:
03/05/2014 12:22:16 AM MST

Kai Larsen teaches his "Privacy in the Age of Facebook" class at CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business. Above, they discuss the government's access to digital information.
(Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post)

According to the CIA, somewhere around 245 million people in the U.S. were Internet users in 2009. Coming from different backgrounds, geographies, ideologies and socioeconomic situations, you'd expect there to be about 245 million different approaches to privacy on the Internet, and for them to be constantly evolving, too. Nonetheless, says Kai Larsen, a 2011 study broke us all down into four types: unconcerned Internet users, circumspect Internet users, wary Internet users and alarmed Internet users.

Larsen is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business, where he teaches a course called Privacy in the Age of Facebook.

The study asked people to rate, from “not at all concerned” to “extremely concerned” a variety of situations, such as “You receive e-mail from a company whose Web page you recently visited” and “You receive an e-mail and have no idea how the company got your address.”

The unconcerned accounted for 16 percent of the study's respondents, circumspect 38 percent, wary 43 percent and alarmed 3 percent. Even if those percentages didn't then or don't now exactly accurately reflect how many people are really in those categories, the categories are useful. They give us options.

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Which kind of Internet user are you?

“Unconcerned” Internet users either don't know or don't care that their information is being collected and sold as companies assemble incredibly detailed profiles on them. Moving toward the “alarmed” Internet user category, you get increasing levels of both awareness and concern.

Tim Shisler, 30, lives in Broomfield and is the father of a 2-month-old girl. But in his first job out of college, he worked in public relations for an online security company, where he learned that the Internet isn't infallible.

“It never came as a big surprise when you'd hear about sites being attacked,” he says. There are risks to being free with your personal information — but your personal information is also the fuel for so much of today's wondrous technology.

“We're in an age today where there's a trade-off for your user experience,” Shisler says. For example, if you don't give up your location data, a key function of a popular app may not work for you.

With a pragmatic evaluation like that, he might fall into the “circumspect” user category. Circumspect users wouldn't give out their Social Security number easily and would be suspicious of a site that had their information giving it to another company.

“Wary” users are also concerned about secret data collection, according to the study, occasionally registering for profiles on websites — and most likely providing less information than the site requests.

“Alarmed” users would be highly concerned with privacy in all situations, only accounting for 3 percent of respondents in the 2011 study. If they register on a website, it's likely that they would provide incomplete data, or even inaccurate data.

So which are you?

Increased age and education both predict increased concern, but to get to the heart of the matter, Larsen likes this thought experiment: “Would you rather keep the Internet the way it is right now or have a counter up in the corner in your screen that counts how much money you've spent?”

For example, on opening an online news story, imagine you're charged for the amount of time it took to report it, write it, edit it, shoot the photos and publish it to the Web, to manage those employees and pay their benefits, pay for use of the bandwidth, the servers and the people who maintain them — everything. And the same goes for the next story. And for the music video you watch. And the music you stream on Spotify for free. And for the server space and technology it takes to store your friends' photos and updates on Facebook.

“I now have the choice between seeing the real cost of the services and technologies that are provided to me or just going with giving away my privacy.” He suspects most folks — even die-hards — would choose to give away their privacy.

“We haven't run into that yet,” says Shisler. “Most of my friends are not on these networks all of the time.”

But he understands the concern.

For a sense of what giving away your privacy looks like, he recommends an add-on for the Firefox browser, once called Collusion, now called Lightbeam. It tracks the trackers, so to speak.

“What that's going to do is, the moment you go to a website like denverpost.com or anywhere else, it will create a visual for you showing which websites are tracking you,” he says. Then, when you navigate to another site, the graphic updates to show you who was tracking you at both sites. In other words, who's following you around the Internet, getting a more and more educated picture of who you are, based on where you browse — and then, very probably, selling that information.

“That's the cost of all this free stuff,” Larsen says. “So you can start thinking about it as 'Big Brother is watching us,' or you can think of us as an ultimate form of payment. I tend to see it more as the latter.

“If you trust the companies and the people you're giving all this information to, then we are living in pretty amazing times.”

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